Friday Morning in San Pedro

View from the front deck Dec. 18

Awash in sunlight on this first day back to the coast. I am grateful as always for this bright hillside. And noting, as always, the miracle of waking up in the cold and dark of Flint early yesterday morning and walking along the ocean bluffs of San Pedro by mid-afternoon. I often think of those people who practically starved in their covered wagons struggling across mountain and desert. And here I am, having had nine-grain cereal with soy milk and a sweet cappucino at Rex's, having kissed my husband and held his hand over the breakfast table, reading him his Virgo horoscope (he will be "childlike" in the best ways, his sense of wonder blooming), having done my ritual head stand and meditation, and now moving back and forth between our front porch and our back deck, taking the sun, as they say, with the relief of a parolee.

And noting, too, how much better I feel than last winter, when I arrived in Pedro before Christmas full of angst and physical commotion. It is a great thing to be healthy. I ran up to the corner first thing this morning to greet my beloved hilly Peck Avenue, the route of my cherished long walks to the Korean Bell of last February and daily all through the summer -- a crucial element in my healing. The whole place seems full of love today.

Here's a poem I wrote last summer, in appreciation:

Walking on Peck

When I first came back to the coast
after the hard Michigan winter
I couldn’t take much.
I felt lost,
strange to myself,
and easily frightened
as if somebody new was living
alongside me in my body.
I wasn’t sure who that was
or what to make of it.
All I wanted to do
was walk, the blues and golds
shining off saltwater a relief
to me, the wide open harbor
like getting out of jail,
and especially the air – elixir of air –
every breath – I wanted one after
another – a sign I was still alive.
I walked up and down Peck Avenue
a hundred times, its steep dips requiring
lungs and legs to work together. I felt
my body doing its job and I could lose
my fractured self in thought
or not think at all,
getting to know myself,
old scabs shed, me the tender
pink miraculous skin
underneath
healed or healing, rosy.
Life wanted me. And so I
walked, and looked, and breathed.

5 a.m. is getting better

A dear friend with expertise about sleeping explained to me lately that there's such a thing -- natural for people my age, and in winter -- called "second sleep." The idea is that you sleep deeply for a few hours of the night, then naturally wake up, get up and do some chores, and then go back to sleep when you're sleepy and enjoy a few more hours. Lately this seems to be working for me as I slowly recuperate from my long fall and winter when my body's immune system got so discombobulated and off balance. I am training myself in new habits, among them reframing the nature of my sleep routines.

There's a trick to it -- the creepiness of lying awake in some of the darkest hours, listening to the inventory of ghastly news on the BBC, and wondering endlessly "why I can't sleep" is replaced by something pleasant and, one could say, "normal." When I get up at 4 or 4:30 or 5 I microwave a glass of soy milk and sip it slowly, enjoying its calming warmth. I listen to the furnace. I sometimes check my email. I've written poems (perhaps this is how my friend Greg Rappleye came to call his wonderful blog "Sonnets at 4 a.m.") and worked away in little leisurely bursts at various projects.

And I've returned to bed when I'm ready, grateful for Ted's warm body. I'm lucky that my schedule allows me to sleep until 8:30 or so in the morning, so it's quite possible to get several solid hours of "second sleep."

I like this new routine, which takes the fear and angst out of not being able to sleep. Perhaps, in other words, there is a natural rhythm to it, and not simply an endless cycle of angst and despair. Looked at this way, 5 a.m. is not so bad. In fact, I am beginning to look forward to these quiet hours. Why should 5 a.m. have such a bad reputation?

Notes from a Recovery

Carnations by Richard Mach, Ph.D.


1. I ate funny. For a solid week, all I could seem to eat were bananas and avocados. Fortunately, I like bananas and avocados. Ah, there's something luxurious about slicing open the nubbly black skin, parting the halves of the fruit, lightly pulling out the pit, sprinkling in some kosher salt, and eating the creamy green meat right out of the skin with a spoon. Bananas are nice for a similar reason -- you don't need a dish if you're too exhausted to even think about putting a plate in the sink.

2. Later, the cuisine of choice was bacon and yogurt. Don't ask me why, except to get rid of the bad case of thrush I was on a forced sort of customized Adkins Diet. I think I shocked my friend Kim, one of my Steady Eddy's family at The Farmer's Market, when I demanded a double order of bacon one morning. She'd never even seen me eat a BITE of bacon in all my years of having breakfast there: I'm usually a tofu reuben girl. Of course Mike crisped up a pile for me back in the kitchen, and it tasted FABULoUS. Oddly, the first thing I did afterwards was buy an antique oval mirror at the second hand store next door to Steady Eddy's -- only $35. Why I'd want anything to expose my pasty mug at this point is beyond me, but the point was that I loved the oval, the ebony frame. I wanted something beautiful.

3. And the bacon obsession led me to unearth my mother's antique cast iron frying pan. It was buried in a bottom cupboard with cake pans and a drainer piled on top of it. I love this frying pan - the real deal, probably 150 years old, heavy as hell. I fried up all my therapeutic bacon in this family heirloom. It was like having my mother with me, saying, "hang in there and remember the old values. You will be okay."

4. Swimming. Ted and I joined the UMF Rec Center and have been walking the track -- a meditation I find calming. But twice so far I also went through the considerable rigamarole to swim in the pool. Despite having to walk a long tunnel under the building to get there, etc. etc., once I get there I can slide into the warm water, roll over on my back and just float. Yeah, I did a few Puritanical laps because that's who I am, but the best is just floating, looking up at the concrete square patterns in the ceiling and let them glide by as I put my mind into neutral. I love the water, sinking into serenity.

5. Flowers from "Schmedly." One of my neighbors has decided that we all need bits of color in our email inboxes every morning. He never says much about any of his photos, from his garden last summer, but just attaches a flower. I can't tell you how much these gorgeous shots have meant each morning: it's chemical-free treatment for SADD...little daily joy pills. The carnations above are one of the first ones I got from him -- I love them. Thank you, Schmedly.

Sado-Masochism and the Screaming Child

I spent two hours of MLK Day sitting in the dentist's chair. Well, wait, it's not really the dentist's chair because HE'S never in the chair and, for that matter, neither is my dominatrix hygienist of the day, Rose. It was sort of an accident -- my appointment wasn't until weeks later and when I called to change an 8 a.m. appointment to a more civilized hour, they tricked me into accepting a cancellation for that very afternoon -- a rare day off.

No matter what I do they always yell at me. Except for Kathy, that is, my favorite hygienist, who had bought my novel and leaned around the corner into Rose's cubicle to dish about the book. "I wish I'd had a life like that," Kathy said, while I drooled from the godawful banana-flavored numbing cream Rose had just q-tipped onto my gums. Damn that stuff is bitter. "I wish I'd had that much fun."

"Issha novel," I garbled, "made moshtovitup."

"Yeah, I'm not buying that," Kathy said. Maybe she needs to believe it really is possible to have a life like that. Maybe that's why nobody wants fiction anymore. Everybody wants to believe everything can happen. That's okay, most of my novel actually is true anyway -- or some timeworn version of "true" -- and I did have a hell of a lot of interesting adventures when I was in my twenties.

Anyway, apparently I have a small mouth, my teeth all crowded together in there, and that's why I'm always on the precipice of periodontal disease. When I get Kathy, she's kind to me, and that's why I always try to get her, but the last time, after she finished, the mean dentist came in and said I needed to come back three days later because Kathy hadn't gotten all the plaque off. I accepted the appointment but when I got home I called right away and cancelled it. They get me two hours every four or six months, and that's it. I like Kathy.

So I swear they gave me Rose on MLK Day to get even. She's funny and wry and I secretly like her -- I've been hearing about her kids and stuff for about 15 years -- but she's relentless. This time she insisted on sticking cardboard hell into my mouth for xrays, the heavy vest pushing against my heart and my throat gagging while she dashed away for each print. And then she started the cleaning with that sonic thingie that makes me feel like I'm being waterboarded.

Well, even with that I was holding my own reasonably well, concentrating on the oldies songs on CARS 108 and trying to get a peek at paltry snowflakes drizzling onto a little pine I always watch outside Rose's window. Then this kid arrived in the next cubicle over, and as soon as he got into the chair, he started shrieking. It went on through the eight needle pricks Rose administered to numb my wussy upper gums, it went on through all four of my quadrants, and it went on even through the cherry-flavored polishing.

"Wha ish it? Gwatanamo ovrthere?" I sputtered. "Hey, kid, don't give up the sheecrets!" Rose giggled and told me to suction. She said my gums were bleeding even though I floss every night and I've even switched to a buzzing electric toothbrush.

The kid shrieked some more.

"Theyshoogashim," I said.

"They're trying," Rose said. "He won't breathe in." He was eight, she said, and he does that every time.

Eventually the kid got done and I got done. The mean dentist, who's really not mean, came in and felt up my neck for tumors and shit and checked my gums, declaring me cavity and plaque-free. I asked him why he was running Abu Ghraib in Flushing, Michigan and he didn't laugh. I thought I was quite hilarious. Neil Diamond was warbling "Sweet Caroline" when I finally clambered out of the chair and got my free toothbrush and dental floss. When I went out to pay my bill the kid was playing with Legos in the waiting room, his hair askew but his face almost disturbingly calm. He wasn't making a sound. His brother was next in the chair, and Rose told me he never fights in the slightest.